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By DE Editors

August 14, 2019

Dear DE Reader,

For years the leading companies in 3D rendering and animation visualization have been watching with interest as GPU computational power matured. Almost every vendor in this space has used CPUs, not GPUs (graphics processing units)—as their rendering and ray tracing engine. But recent advances have caused them to reconsider the issue.

Now a leading name in visualization for product development has thrown in with GPUs. Luxion announces the new version of KeyShot 3D will support NVIDIA RTX-accelerated ray tracing and denoising. It is a big transition not only for Luxion but for the industry. And this transition we salute by naming Luxion KeyShot 9 as our Editor’s Pick of the Week.

Luxion founder Henrik Wann Jensen, a graphics industry pioneer, describes the transition. “Luxion has evaluated GPU rendering for several years,” he says. “With NVIDIA’s RTX technology, GPU-accelerated hardware ray tracing and AI denoising, gigaray performance, GPUs with over 8GB of memory, and the free OptiX SDK, now is the time” to make the switch.

The switch will be painless for KeyShot users. In the next month or so Luxion will ship KeyShot 9, an update that implements NVIDIA RTX with OptiX into KeyShot with native, out-of-the-box support for the Nvidia OptiX ray tracing engine. Users can update their hardware whenever they choose.

Once updated, when KeyShot detects a compatible Nvidia GPU, KeyShot users will see a new GPU button on the KeyShot Ribbon. When activated, the scene in the Real-time View and the rendered output will be rendered on the GPU instead of CPU. KeyShot will use NVIDIA RTX technology for GPU-accelerated hardware ray tracing. This includes the new AI-based denoising technology and gigaray performance.

Luxion won’t kiss CPUs goodbye quite yet. KeyShot users who update to version 9 will not have to update their hardware immediately. They can continue to use KeyShot’s market-leading technology for product image rendering as they have for years. When they upgrade to a new Maxwell-class NVIDIA GPU, or purchase a new workstation or the RTX Studio Laptop, KeyShot will automatically notice and offer the GPU option.

There are more details in today’s Product Brief. Thanks for reading; we will be back next week with another Editor’s Pick of the Week.